From a Crooked Rib by Nuruddin Farah

Written with complete conviction from a woman's point of view, Nuruddin Farah's spare, shocking first novel savagely attacks the traditional values of his people yet is also a haunting celebration of the unbroken human spirit. Ebla, an orphan of eighteen, runs away from her nomadic encampment in rural Somalia when she discovers that her grandfather has promised her in marriage to an older man. But even after her escape to Mogadishu, she finds herself as powerless and dependent on men as she was out in the bush. As she is propelled through servitude, marriage, poverty, and violence, Ebla has to fight to retain her identity in a world where women are "sold like cattle."

Bob Adelman is a well-known and respected photo-documentarian and book producer. His photographs have been in collections at the Museum of Modern Art and he has won the Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and many other awards. He lives in Miami, Florida. Calvin Tomkins is an author and art critic for the New Yorker who wrote the magazine's Art World column between 1980 and 1988. He has interviewed and written numerous profiles on major twentieth century figures from the art world, including Marcel Duchamp and Robert Rauschenberg. He lives in New York City.